Silver Womb

Linette Widen
iUniverse (2006)
ISBN 9780595384365
Reviewed by Cathy Yanda for Reader Views (1/07)


Not many authors can weave a historical tale beginning with silver mining and ending with syphilis and get away with it. Ms. Widen does just that and more. “Silver Womb,” the sequel to “Grave Talker,” takes place in the Coeur d’Alenes of northern Idaho and tells the story of the Foster and Connor families in 1917.

“Silver Womb,” the story of two families, is told through the perspective of two main characters. Earl Foster is an eighteen-year-old ruffian who has recently graduated high school and gone to work full time in the silver mines with his father. He has his eye on Bertie Conner, a beautiful, self-centered, seventeen-year-old, who is looking to find a way out of town as quickly as possible. Earl, being blind to her ways, is set on doing whatever it takes to make her his wife. And the story begins.

As the reader flows from one mini-story to another in the lives of these two families, there is always something new to learn about the early 1900’s. First, the reader is transported to a Box Social, a church function where young men bid on picnic baskets made by the young women. The young men then get to have lunch with the young women and spend time alone with them. You will go along with the Foster boys as they hunt for silver, are attacked by a bear, nearly killing one of them. There is a carnival, baseball games, whorehouses, Thanksgiving dinner, an avalanche, and much more. And there are Sadie and Zetta.

Sadie is a girl who will capture your heart. Fooled by a man who told her he was going to show her the good things in life, she ends up a whore. After being kidnapped, held captive and forced to take care of a toddler while her kidnapper is off making whiskey, she plans a very risky escape. Carrying out her plan flawlessly, she and Zetta are free and end up rescued by Earl Foster’s aunt, Anne. The story takes some twists and turns along the way. Bit by bit, the reader is let in on a family secret that is not fully revealed until almost the very end.

Ms. Widen captures a little bit of each of us in her characters. This novel can be summed up with the words eleven-year-old Mo Foster writes on the first page of “Silver Womb,” “the things we value most in life often change.”

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